I would really love it if you could enable functionality that allows you to build playlists off of ratings that you give songs, and movies.
I use the functionality in iTunes quite often. However, if I had the choice I would migrate away from iTunes, but until someone else provides the smart playlist functionality that they do. I'm still kind of stuck.
Like it would be nice to set a smart playlist that I can filter on 4 and 5 star songs that return the top 50 played. So, I could have my personal top 50.
The same thing goes for my other smart-playlist that I have set up that has everything I haven't rated yet.
The new Music functionality that has been added has been great, but it would be so much better if say I rated the music or the videos, and could have all my 5 Star videos play at a party. So, you could have all of your favorite music videos playing in the background while entertaining.
I agree. Plex's smart playlists aren't very smart. In itunes I have playlists like this:
rating >= 3 and playdate > 12 months ago and genre <> "holiday"
This currently appears to be impossible in plex (or at least I haven't figured out how to do it).
+1 for sure. I'm recently converted from listening to all my music via the iTunes channel in Plex to Plex music and playlists, and "Smart" playlists are severely lacking. I'm hoping that it is in the works. Shouldn't be to hard to add that functionality.
Yes, yes, yes! This lack of feature is the reason I still use iTunes and not Plex for my main music playing. All of my portable music devices sync based on three smart playlists:
Favorites
Least recently played
Least frequently played
Absolutely! Instead of having to go through all the various shows I NEED to watch each week, or episodes of shows I only watch with a friend, I’d love to be able to create a playlist to automatically add new episodes of shows that I choose. Kind of like how Sync has the ability to add x-many new shows and automatically delete the shows you’ve already watched.
Except for network attached storage (NAS) Plex environment, almost everything you need in music is there but the smart playlist. No one has time to pick through 10,000-20,000 songs and manually put in a playlist. Just start simple and add a few of the most used items we like to use to build a playlist i.e. ratings, genre, exclusion capability, year, etc.
Currently, there is no NAS capability to import iTunes playlists or ratings, from what I can find. But the playlist issue would just go away if the Plex had smarter functionality to build a playlist which could come close to my music lists in iTunes. The ratings are a must in NAS and would like to import from my Mac or another service. I have multiple Plex servers, perhaps, creating a relationship between PLEX servers so that rating data or playlists could be imported to NAS. Otherwise, smart playlist feature in NAS really loses some weight.
Bumping and liking this one as well. The major way I see Plex lacking behind other music players like iTunes is that its smart playlist feature is very, very limited. iTunes lets you create a smart playlist based on any number of sets of criteria you want involving any of the meta data for a track or video. (Including really great things like artist, rating, length, year play count, last played date, last skipped date, genre, date added, etc. etc.)
I’d recommend the Plex developers check out the smart playlist feature in iTunes if they’re not already familiar with it and strongly consider duplicating most of not all of that functionality in Plex. iTunes is a particularly good example because it’s an implementation of the feature that is simultaneously very powerful but also very accessible even for non-technical users.
PLEX actually has smart playlists but the interface for creating them isn’t very intuitive and the filters you can have aren’t robust.
Here’s how to create a ratings based playlist:
Go to your music library.
Switch to the Track view (as opposed to Artists or Albums).
Click New Filter
Click Rating
Click 5 Stars and 4 Stars. You should see the listing filter down to 4- and 5-star rated tracks.
Click the Add to Playlist icon on the left sidebar.
Name the playlist.
Now go to your server’s Playlists section. You will see the playlist with a gear icon on it; that gear indicates that it’s a smart playlist. If you rate any other track in that music library with 4 or 5 stars, the track will automatically be added to that playlist.
So Smart Playlists exist and technically work, but you notice that there’s not a lot of filtering options. For Tracks, you can only filter by Rating and Collection. Switch to Albums and you get different options (Genre, Year, etc.), and Artist has its own as well. But you can’t mix and match these filters; if you filter albums, you add the whole album to the playlist.
Plex would really benefit from a total overhaul of the Smart Playlist feature. I use Smart Playlists all the time for video content (I set up “channels” for TV shows, like “Sitcoms” or “Action Shows”), but I still feel like more robust filtering options would be useful, as well as having a specific interface for creating Smart Playlists in the first place. The new search that was introduced a few updates ago also nerfed Smart Playlists as well; you used to be able to use the search box to filter the library view and add to playlist that way. Keyword-filtering for Smart Playlists! It was great. But the new search doesn’t do that anymore.
I also agree with everyone. I am pretty disappointed on the fact that iTunes is much better to handle music rather than Plex. I have bought the lifetime Plex pass but my disappointment didn’t change. I am greek and i have both greek and non greek songs. In iTunes i had added in the comments the word greek in all my greek songs so they can be added automatically to a smart list for greek music. I also wanted to have 700 songs max in that list of those that i haven’t heard in the last 60 days. I can clearly see that such a smart playlist cannot be created in Plex.
Please add my support for better handling of smart playlists. Since I have way too much music to fit comfortably on phones and tablets, smart playlists are the way that I keep those devices reasonably synced. For example:
Most recently added music. I have multiple of these playlists for devices with different amounts of storage. So I can limit by say last 6 months for one device and 12 months for another device.
Playlists for keeping the least recently heard favorite music. These select by rating and then limit the amount (by number of tracks or amount of space) selected by least recently played. A variant on this would use “least played” rather than “least recently played”.
Being able to select based on content of titles, artists, composers, etc.
@debdavid said:
Please add my support for better handling of smart playlists. Since I have way too much music to fit comfortably on phones and tablets, smart playlists are the way that I keep those devices reasonably synced. For example:
Most recently added music. I have multiple of these playlists for devices with different amounts of storage. So I can limit by say last 6 months for one device and 12 months for another device.
Playlists for keeping the least recently heard favorite music. These select by rating and then limit the amount (by number of tracks or amount of space) selected by least recently played. A variant on this would use “least played” rather than “least recently played”.
Being able to select based on content of titles, artists, composers, etc.
I’d agree with this list. It sounds so dumb to say this, and I am NOT advocating this product, but mirroring the iTunes Smart Playlist features is a bright idea.
Especially keen for smart playlists to happen now since star ratings have been taken away from apple music in iOS 10.
Would love to switch to plex music but still find it limiting due to the lack of smart filters.
While Smart Playlists like this are an absolute must, it means nothing if you can’t select multiple songs and batch-star them. In fact, just trying to load a huge playlist is a nightmare cause you have to scroll…wait to load more…scroll…wait to load more…scroll.
Agreed, need more smart playlist functionality. Currently I’m using iTunes (blech) for music so I sync down 4* songs to my device and have playlists based on genre, star rating, artists, etc. I’d love to dump itunes and use plex exclusively for music.
Ideally smart playlists could filter off of any number of id3 tag fields for mp3. (4* country songs by George Jones and Johnny Cash for example). Please add
@owenrg said:
Could this be carried over to tv/movies? I’d love to have a smart playlist that automatically adds any 4k movie to a 4k playlist.
I know you can sort video by resolution, and then add them to a playlist, but a smart playlist that could do this would be awesome.
You can already do this. Go into your movie library, do a custom filter, and set the resolution rule. Then click the add to playlist button. Bingo, smart playlist.
